Author: Alicia

Edited excerpts from Lyndon LaRouche’s discussion with the LaRouchePAC Policy Committee, March 23.

Few Americans are untouched by the suicides of our fellow-citizens, especially those who should be our most productive workers.  Whether suicides per se or through drugs or alcohol.  You have to understand these kinds of things; you cannot put them at a distance; you have to get the full blast of what happened.  And then, once you have done that, now you can be expiated under those circumstances, and say, yes, I’ve understood what the issue was, I’ve understood what the problem was, I’ve understood what the solution has to be.

There is not really the kind of attachment, even of the members of my own organization, of the type one would think would be appropriate for people who are very serious about life.  And, therefore the seriousness of human life is something that has to be fully appreciated, otherwise you lose something of yourself. Otherwise you lose the ability to make good judgments.

There’s no simple solution: as long as Obama and people like him exist as dominant forces in government, that’s going to continue.  Just think of the death-rate which is being imposed upon people who were actually formerly professionally employed. And they were just destroyed, or driven into suicide. And that has been going on, and those kinds of conditions are going on now.  And that’s what the characteristics of the United States are now, that kind of behavior, and nothing much is being done about it.  And the Congress is not particularly useful in this area right now.  So it can be addressed, but the question is, what are we doing about it?  What means do we have to actually to do something to make this effective?  And I say, right now we have almost nothing.  We have the edges of things, but not really.  We don’t have a mission-orientation which will stick. We can probably intimidate people in their consciences about it, but that’s about it.

Kesha Rogers of Texas intervened:

Lyndon LaRouche resumed: Remember that Obama is the enemy. Our mission is to get rid of Obama. He shut down the space program, and caused many other of these consequences with his bizarre behavior.  Don’t worry about Trump as such: get rid of Obama.  That would change everything: like changing the diaper at last.

Drug overdose deaths by county, 2002-2014. Overdose deaths have skyrocketed in nearly every county across the United States during the Bush and Obama presidencies.

Let’s look at it objectively, that is from a broader standpoint.  These people are committing suicide, or destroying themselves in effect.  Are we allowing that to happen?  We’re not allowing it, you would say: yet we’re not doing anything to prevent it from happening.  That’s where the problem comes in. Are you producing the solution for the problem?— that’s the issue.  Every part of the United States, more or less, is afflicted with an increasing accumulation of people who are in desperate condition, either implicitly or implicitly.  Those who are known to be deprived, are deprived,— but those who are experiencing the effect of that deprivation of others, are also deprived in that way.  That’s the kind of problem that we have to deal with.

What we need to do: is you have to get mankind, himself to understand: What’s wrong with Obama?  Well, Obama is Satanic. That’s not an exaggeration; his character is Satanic.  Everything about him is more than Satanic, in effect.  And yet we tolerate that.  People say they support the President, when he’s a Satanic figure.  And he goes around running Satanic operations.  And they’re not impressed; they’re not sensitive.

So you get the person who says, “Oh, it’s so sad, he died, he committed suicide, because he was depressed.”  What about what could have prevented that from happening?  That’s where the crime comes in.  People will say, “Oh, it’s too bad that people are suffering like this,” but they’re not going to do anything about it.  That’s where the problem lies.  Because if you can’t get a people that will muster themselves up to accomplish things that are necessary for themselves, then it doesn’t work.  We do have a weakness in this area; it’s not our weakness as such, but we do share the burden.

There’s no doubt of the consequence that’s implicit in our Manhattan concerts and events.  And what we have to do is get an estimate of the situation in other parts of the United States. What Kesha Rogers is doing, works.  And she’s become more conscious of her role of leadership.  We need more of that in more parts of the United States.  People come to the rescue, but they don’t come fast enough.  Since I went to prison, my own organization has not really been responsive to this, because some went to prison, and some sloughed it off.

If you want to make it work, you often have to spread it. You can’t just make it work; you have to spread the process of reaction of that type.  Then, other people get more into it: it works.  Otherwise, you’re looking at the aroma, not the substance.  Something of that nature, you have to get it into your gut, to resonate.  Which is the meaning of Manhattan.  We need more of that.  Otherwise, people around you who are frightened or suffering, they’ll realize you’re brushing it off. That “brushing-off” process is accumulating throughout the United States.  And we have to bring forth a sense of concern, of serious concern for mankind.

Look at the history of Franklin Roosevelt’s policy and practice.  The issue is there. Because the struggle Franklin Roosevelt actually had, directly and indirectly as well, was a very striking, very important development. Then, when you got to 1936, coming out of the earlier 1930s, people began to get suddenly inspired with optimism, a growing optimism,— until the FBI destroyed Franklin Roosevelt’s program while he was still alive and in office.  The FBI was the agency which destroyed the morality of the United States, no one should forget that.  The FBI is the dirty enemy of the United States and its principles. Now, we’re come to a time in which the FBI is no longer really useful; there’s nothing useful about it. And therefore the time has come, that we have to change the law to bring back the Franklin Roosevelt tradition.  And therefore we are going to move joyously into doing things which mankind has not done for a long time.  And that’s what builds morality, what we should really call morality.  A devotion to the progress and success of mankind.  And we don’t have that nowadays; we lost it a long time ago.  The idea of building something that’s going to make the whole field better; that’s what Franklin Roosevelt’s movement represented, and that’s what we have lost, largely, in the United States today.

Are we doing it?  Are we actually practicing that approach, or are we talking about it?  I think it would take relatively little effort to make that shift.  All you have to do is start it; all you have to do is get the thing started, and others will respond.  Because people surrender to a sense of, “the way things are.”  They say “yes that’s true, but, you’ve got to think of the way things are.”

What we’re doing in Texas right now, is really very important in that way.  It’s one way of getting the message across, by taking one area of work, and pushing that to be the infectious agent for changing the trend.  What we really need right now, is an affirmation that these changes that we threaten to bring about, will function.  When people get ignited with the fact that they have rights, rights that they thought they had lost, that’s when you get the kind of ignition we need now in the United States.  Without that, I don’t think the United States can make it.

The main thing is to try to get the idea of an organization which is committed to victory, like a military organization, which gets out there and gets the job done.  Texas can be one of the ignition points; Manhattan is another area of opportunity.

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Otmar Issing, former chief economist of the European Central Bank, denounced the “helicopter money” idea of European Central Bank head Mario Draghi and the Bank of England. Issing sounded the alarm in an interview with the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung [faz] March 22.

“I see the entire idea of helicopter money as worrisome, even devastating,” Issing said. “For, it is nothing else than a bankruptcy declaration of monetary policy…. A central bank that is throwing out money for free, will hardly be able to regain control of the printing-press.” Issing implied an attack on Draghi when he added, “This debate has spread out into the public. I see it as total intellectual confusion.” And he said, “The economic condition of the world is being meddled into chaos which can’t be described.”

The FAZ adds a key point: “Helicopter money is intended to be a targeted financial injection to companies and consumers directly from the central bank, bypassing the normal banking sector [emphasis added—ed.]. ECB President Mario Draghi, in answer to a question, called this ‘a very interesting concept.'”

But it is the Bank of England (BoE) which is studying the “interesting concept” most intensely, as described in a London Telegraph article March 13 by Ambrose Evans-Pritchard. The BoE is studying such “targeted injections” as done by creating electronic money, Evans-Pritchard reports. The goal would be to allow the central bank “to turn the money tap on and off with calibrated precision.” And, said the BoE Deputy Governor Ben Broadbent, the system could be designed so that people or companies could bypass the commercial banks and hold deposits directly with the BoE. “It’s likely you’d see money moving out of existing [bank] deposits.” Central bank electronic money “could be used to cover government services, tax collection, and benefit payments,” noted Evans-Pritchard from his sources.

Then he came to the point: “Ultimately it could achieve some of the objectives of ‘narrowing banking’ proposed by Adam Smith, or the ‘Chicago Plan’ put forward by U.S. [University of Chicago—ed.] economists in the ’30s … to transfer control of money creation from private banks to the state.”

And here the FAZ and New York Times were telling us “helicopter money” was intended as economic stimulus! But it is really an austerity tool, taking “money creation” away from those evil old commercial banks with that evil old practice of lending more than they have in reserve. Untimately, down that path lies the old British colonial “currency board,” which made sure that a colonial country’s currency in circulation never exceeded the “value” of the gold in its vaults.

These central bank helicopters will be engaged in killing by friendly fire. 

The reality of the collapse of the entire western financial system is no more clearly expressed than in the discussion now dominating the leading banking circles across Europe and the US—to adopt “helicopter money” as the next stage of insanity in dealing with the bankruptcy of the system. An idea introduced by economic fascist Milton Friedman, and promoted by former Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, helicopter money entails the central banks by-passing the banks altogether, and simply printing money for the governments, or even for businesses and private citizens.        

Insane? Of course—and those few leading bankers who have retained an ounce of sanity are admitting it. Otmar Issing, the former chief economist at the European Central Bank (whose current chief Mario Draghi announced this month that it will increase the QE printing of money for the banks from 60 to 80 billion euros every month, and reduce interest rates to negative!) today told the German Press Agency that this discussion was simply a declaration of bankruptcy. “I see the entire idea of helicopter money as worrisome, even devastating,” Issing said. “For it is nothing else than a bankruptcy declaration of monetary policy…. A central bank that is throwing out money for free, will hardly be able to regain control of the printing-press…. I view that as a total mental disarray.”        

Yet the American and European populations have been so beaten down and terrified that they tolerate this madness. As the American population is driven into massive drug addiction, demoralization and escalating numbers of suicides, people say, “Yes, but—I didn’t cause that and there is nothing I can do.”        

That is both false and cowardly. What can and must be done was demonstrated today in Frankfurt, Germany, where scientists and engineers and citizens from across Europe and Africa met with Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche to discuss “Solving the Economic and Refugee Crises with the New Silk Road!” It was also demonstrated in Texas, where LaRouchePAC leader Kesha Rogers intervened in a demoralized meeting of NASA scientists who were resigned to living within Obama’s collapsing NASA budget. Rogers revived their spirits by addressing the cause of the crisis in the collapse of the financial system, which can and must be replaced, and in Obama himself, who can and must be removed from office—now, not next year. It was even demonstrated in war-torn Yemen, where a friend of LaRouche released the recently translated Arabic version of the EIR Special Report The New Silk Road Becomes the World Land-Bridge, introduced enthusiastically by the former President of Sana’a University.        

Backing up this effort stand China and Russia. Secretary Kerry is in Moscow, where he is meeting with Foreign Minister Lavrov and President Putin, continuing to carry on real diplomacy outside of the control of the White House, to end the terrorist threat in Syria and beyond. In China, Premier Li Keqiang brought the leaders of the Mekong nations together to launch the Silk Road process along the Mekong—a policy promoted by Franklin Roosevelt in the 1930s, modeled on his TVA project, but which has been systematically sabotaged from any significant progress over these past 80 years under the influence of the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. China will now sidestep that sabotage and help these national launch real development, as they are across the world.        

Americans and Europeans are beginning to recognize, although far too slowly, that the hysterical effort to present Russia and China as enemies, and that we must prepare for war, is both suicidal for the human race, and the opposite of the truth. China and Russia and the BRICS nations are offering a life-line of a scientific and cultural Renaissance to a dying culture in the West. Are we human enough to get on board?

I’m interested, tell me more

New Paradigm for Mankind Show—Just returning from intervening at a major lunar and planetary science conference, Kesha Rogers joins Megan Beets and Benjamin Deniston to discuss the absolute necessity of mankind’s pursuit of space development. While Obama has presided over the shutdown of NASA’s manned space program, Kesha has led the fight to save and advance our space program. Now is the time to toss Obama aside and pursue our true destiny as a creative species.

On March 23, 1983—33 years ago today—President Ronald Reagan made history by announcing the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) on live national television, shocking even some of his closest advisers. Presenting what he called “a vision of the future which offers hope,” Reagan committed the United States to a crash program for the development of missile defense technology to “free the world from the threat of nuclear war.” Reagan’s announcement was a declaration that the era of the international reign of terror known as Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) was over.

See the full story of the SDI.

Members and supporters of the Belgian LaRouche movement Agora Erasmus, who were close to the events in Brussels when they happened Tuesday, are reportedly safe. Agora Erasmus released the following statement following yesterday’s terrorist attacks:

Today Brussels is in tears. At this tragic juncture, our thoughts and heart goes to the victims, their families and friends. Our affection and support goes to the first aid workers, the police forces, the security services, the authorities of the government and to all those simple citizens who kept calm and showed solidarity in this horrible hardship.

However, we cannot but call on the Belgian government to draw the lessons of these attacks, and uproot immediately both the known networks as well as the godfathers of this barbarism:

– First of all, the decades long, evil role of Saudi Arabia and Qatar, in spreading the Wahhabite and Salafist ideologies and the financing of terrorist organizations, on which the Belgian, as well as the US, the British as well as the French government, have closed eyes and even beyond, to which some… have offered honorific distinctions…

– Then, there is the complicity with Daesh of Turkey, a member state of NATO whose headquarters are 8 km from the attacks. While Erdogan and his family buys Daesch’s oil and provides them with weapons and equipments, the EU submits itself to Turkeys wishes by exchanging refugees and offering him billions of Euros.

– Finally, there is the financing of terrorism, which would be impossible without the banking facilities of the fiscal safe heavens offered by the City of London and Wall Street, as documented in a US Senate report in the case of British bank HSBC. In Belgium, an investigative parliamentary commission on the financing sources of terrorism, if allowed to do their job, would quickly arrive at the conclusion that an orderly banking reorganization, through a banking separation law based on the Glass-Steagall Act, would be an excellent weapon in the war on terrorism.

Besides those three concrete measures, we need a shift in our overall political orientation. Because the monsters that hit us today are the same monsters that western leaders have created and promoted yesterday in their cynical game of geopolitical domination against Russia and China. As a matter of fact, NATO’s secret wars created, not only the breeding ground for the evil terrorism, but also the chaos of the refugee crisis. So the policies that were promoted by our leaders yesterday, willfully or by our submission, are now backfiring as a boomerang and hitting us with full force in the face.

Instead of looking endlessly for confrontation and geopolitical domination, Belgium, as well as other member states of NATO and the EU have everything to win from detente, entente and cooperation with Putin’s Russia, who happens to be the only head of State sticking to principles, and really committed to ending Daesh.

Let’s also deepened our cooperation with China, with whom Belgium is celebrating 45 years of very good relations, and is working for mutual development with its New Silk Road vision. Only economic development shall create better living conditions and cultural exchanges between peoples that will allow us, for real, to eliminate the threat that hit Brussels today.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa hit the nail on the head when he charged last Friday that the “regime change” operations being unleashed against “progressive” governments of South America are a new “Plan Condor,” this time using “submissive judges” and corrupt press.

Correa was referring to the “regime change,” or “color revolution” operations, that have been unleashed against the South American governments allied with the BRICS grouping in forging a new, development-centered world order. In the 1970’s, George Shultz’s and Henry Kissinger’s “Operation Condor,” like Obama’s replay in Victoria Nuland’s 2014 “Maidan” coup in Ukraine, used Nazi networks which survived the Allied victory against Hitler under the protection of the MI-6 and the Dulles brothers’ CIA, to install military dictatorships which imposed Schachtian (that is, Nazi) economic policies across South America, starting with Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship in Chile.

“They no longer need military dictatorships; they need submissive judges, a corrupt press, and the judicialization of politics,” Correa said in a March 18 local press conference. As Argentine political scientist Atilio Boron has said, “this new Condor Plan does not seek to disappear people, but the truth.”

Pointing to the “very serious” operation against Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff and former President Lula da Silva, and what is being done against Argentina’s former President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, the current governments of Bolivia and Venezuela, and his own government, Correa charged that they are seeking “not only the return of neoliberalism, not only to crush humans … but are seeking revenge against those progressive leaders who dared to challenge the power of those elites and the hegemonic power of those countries that have always crushed us,” Correa said.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff spoke similarly Tuesday, in a three-hour meeting at the presidential offices with hundreds of lawyers and judges who have formed the group, “Jurists for Legality and In Defense of Democracy,” against the Constitutional violations being carried out by the “Clean Hands” judges operation ripping the country apart. The impeachment against me is being run as if Brazil were a parliamentary system, in which political suspicion against a president is a sufficient condition to bring down a president; but we are a presidential system, Rousseff said, in which a president can only be impeached for crimes committed and duly proven. To condemn someone for a crime he or she did not commit is a “brutal injustice… I was already a victim of that before, during the dictatorship, and I will fight so as to not be a victim again, in full democracy. What is in progress, is a coup d’etat against democracy. I will never resign. Those who ask for my resignation … are trying to hide precisely this coup against democracy.”

For more on Plan Condor, see EIR‘s 2005 article, “Nazis, Operation Condor, and Bush’s Privatization Plan”

On April 7, 2016, the Manhattan Schiller Institute will be hosting an all-day conference in Manhattan on the theme “Building A World Land-Bridge: Realizing Mankind’s True Humanity.” With the tremendous international successes recently achieved by Helga & Lyndon LaRouche and their associates, including Helga Zepp-LaRouche’s recent trip to India and LaRouche collaborator Hussein Askary’s participation in Cairo with the Egyptian Transportation Minister, launching the Arabic edition of the World Land-Bridge report, it is time to bring the spirit of “win-win” cooperation to the United States! Join in this opportunity to dialogue on the necessary (and beautiful) outlook needed to give the United States a new orientation. View the official invitation here for registration and participation details.

Message from Schiller Institute invite:

“The people of the world must—before it is too late—lift their eyes to the heavens. “Man”, the poet Friedrich Schiller says, “is greater than his destiny.” The question confronting us today, in what may very well be the most precarious period of all human history, is not any single issue, not even the issue of “war or peace,” even though a thermonuclear world war III, now acutely threatened, would annihilate the human species. The question before us all—what is the true nature of mankind?—will no longer permit itself to be ignored. The heavens themselves, and the desperate conditions of life of the world’s majority, demand an immediate end to the mud-bound, enmeshed and mired preoccupations and obsessions of the profit-greedy speculators.

“In the work of the creative scientist, such as the recently celebrated Albert Einstein, a single human mind seems able to uplift the self-conception and power of the whole human race. That individual mind, however, is but one voice in the chorus of humanity itself. In the realization of such unique discoveries, through the discipline of physical economy, as conceived by U.S. Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton, the potential for mankind as a whole to provide such discoveries for the universe itself, is demonstrated to be “the reason we are here”. We are, if we choose to be so, the instrument by means of which the universe itself is made “greater than its destiny.” That is mankind’s extra-terrestrial imperative.

“The Chinese space program’s commitment to explore the far side of the moon; the Russian proposals for a “Strategic Defense of the Earth”, pooling the world’s best minds and resources for a joint defense of mankind as a whole from comets and asteroids; and the redefinition of world physical economy through a new alliance of equals, such as is posed by a possible collaboration of the United States with Russia, China, India, Brazil, and South Africa, and other nations, in the building of a World Land-Bridge, would be a new era in civilization. Economist Lyndon LaRouche, and Schiller Institute founder Helga Zepp-LaRouche have campaigned for this policy for well over 30 years. Their vision, and that of these nations, can become a reality, but only by eliminating the anti-human policies of Wall Street monetarism, and by removing the representatives of those Wall Street policies from institutions of influence and power.

“The moment to introduce the World Land-bridge concept to an American audience is extremely ripe. While the world situation still remains extremely tense, with the ceasefire in Syria negotiated between the United States and Russia, there is a unique—and perhaps rather fleeting—opportunity to put forward the One Belt, One Road (New Silk Road Initiative) as the basis for economic reconstruction of the region, in order to eliminate the underlying causes of war and division. This may well be a matter of life or death for humanity.”

View the official invitation for the conference schedule, registration and participation details.

Governor Raghuram Rajan of the Reserve Bank of India (RBI), India’s central bank, a trained electrical engineer, in a commentary with the Project Syndicate Monday, has strongly criticized the central banks of developed countries, pointing out that

In his commentary, Rajan said what he has in mind

Rajan, who in 2005 had warned about the growing risks in the financial system pursued by then-Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke, at the time had proposed policies that would reduce such risks, at the Federal Reserve annual Jackson Hole conference. As a result, he was ridiculed by Larry Summers, who said the warnings were “misguided” and called Rajan a “Luddite.” At the time, Rajan was teaching at the University of Chicago. 

Douglas R. Oberhelman, Chairman and CEO of Caterpillar Inc., extolled the benefits of President Xi’s New Silk Road, for his company, in an interview on CCTV America Monday. “The Belt and Road [is] made for Caterpillar,” he said. Pointing out that Caterpillar had participated in building the Three Gorges Dam, Oberhelman said that not only are Caterpillar heavy machines needed in construction all along the Belt and Road, but also other CAT products and services.

Caterpillar, headquartered in Peoria, Illinois, is the world’s leading manufacturer of construction and mining equipment, as well as other lines, including farm machinery and diesel and gas engines, and diesel-electric locomotives. In recent years, sales have plunged—especially in the oil, gas, and resources sector, led by the collapse of the Transatlantic economy. Since December 2012, the company has had 39 consecutive months of decline in overall retail equipment sales. Last Fall, Caterpillar announced a two-year downsizing plan involving 20 plant closures and 10,000 lay-offs. So far, five plants are shut, and over 5,000 jobs eliminated.

However, spokesmen for the company are now stressing that there are vast new work and sales potentials for CAT in Eurasia. “Caterpillar Sees Opportunities for Growth in China’s Five-Year Plan,” was the headline on a March 14 Construction Equipment journal report on the view of Chen Qihua, chairman of Caterpillar China, from a Xinhua interview. “Cat suffered double-digit losses in 2015 in part due to China’s economic slowdown. But Chen says achieving China’s goal of a better economy by 2020 will provide Caterpillar with more opportunities, especially in the Belt and Road Initiative, also known as the Silk Road Rebuild Project.”

Meantime, the money-freaks on Wall Street—the megabanks and rating agencies—are debating how far to lower the prospects for CAT’s 2016 share values. 

A new undercover documentary revealing the horrors of the Saudi Arabian kingdom is due to air Tuesday evening on British television, and next week March 29 on PBS’s Frontline. The fascist royals (and Obama) would rather that you not see it.

Five bodies hang from a pole suspended aloft by two large cranes; a woman screams “I did not do it!” just as her head is chopped off; police brandish whips against women; blood runs thick in a public space nicknamed “Chop Chop Square.” Such are the images in “Saudi Arabia Uncovered,” captured by some courageous film makers — Hardcash Productions and Independent “ITV” (Channel 3) in Britain, in conjunction with the American PBS Television — using hidden cameras, bringing the brutality of Saudi Arabia, the closest ally of both the British and American regimes, to the light of day.

Also shown is the extremism of the schools and mosques — spewing hatred equally against Christian, Jew, and Shi’a Muslim — enforced by the thought police, the Orwellian “Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice.” An article in Britain’s Daily Mail notes, “Chillingly, only two other movements in the world — the Taliban in Afghanistan and Islamic State in Syria and Iraq — have organizations with the same name.”

The Daily Mail article goes on to critique this strange “special relationship,” in terms which could apply equally to the Obama White House: “Yet Saudi Arabia remains one of Britain’s closest allies, not just in the Middle East but worldwide, as it has for nearly a century. We sell them arms. They sell us oil. The royal families of each country are close…. Our leaders conveniently overlook the truth about the desert kingdom.”

A demonstration led by economist Dr. Natalia Vitrenko was violently attacked on March 17 in a park in central Kiev, by the Civil Corps of the notorious neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, which is still allowed to receive U.S. money despite attempts in Congress to block such funding. Gathered for the rally to mark the 25th anniversary of a 1991 referendum in which the people of Ukraine, as well as republics of the Soviet Union, voted to preserve the U.S.S.R., were representatives of several political parties allied as the “Left Opposition.” Speakers included four former members of the Supreme Rada, the Parliament of post-1991 independent Ukraine.

Just shy of ten minutes into the rally, as Vitrenko was talking via loudspeaker about the devastation of Ukraine’s economy during the past two and a half decades, a squad of black-clad young men, some of them masked, charged at the rally and attempted to break it up. As the Left Opposition activists defended themselves, several were seriously injured. Two large stones were thrown at the speakers’ position next to a monument to Russia’s and Ukraine’s shared history, one landing close to Vitrenko in what security experts evaluate as an attempt to kill her. Back in 1999, at a point when Vitrenko was showing support of over 30% in opinion polls during her run for the Presidency of Ukraine, she survived a grenade attack on one of her campaign rallies.

The press service of Vitrenko’s party, the Progressive Socialist Party of Ukraine, reports that although proper notice had been given of the plan and schedule for the peaceful demonstration, there was no police presence and the police arrived only half an hour after being called during the attack. Vitrenko has filed a complaint, demanding that a criminal case be opened regarding the violent attempt to block the exercise of the rights to freedom of speech and assembly.

Ukrainian websites cite a release from the so-called Azov Civil Corps, taking credit for the attack. This is the paramilitary “guard” wing of the Azov Battalion, which is officially attached to the Ministry of Internal Affairs (national police) and has incorporated leaders and units of the fascist Right Sector group that was instrumental in the coup d’état—the overthrow of Ukraine’s elected President—in February 2014. Like several Ukrainian neo-fascist youth groups since 1991, including Right Sector’s predecessors the Social-National Party of Ukraine (later Svoboda) and Ukrainian Patriot, Azov flies the Nazi Wolfsangel symbol. The rampages of the Azov squadristi were featured in Paul Moreira’s film “Ukraine: The Masks of Revolution,” released in France earlier this year.

In July 2015 U.S. Congressmen John Conyers (D-MI) and Ted Yoho (R-FL) wrote an amendment to the House Defense Appropriations bill (H.R.2685), which would have limited “arms, training, and other assistance to the neo-Nazi Ukrainian militia, the Azov Battalion.” James Carden, writing in The Nation of Jan. 14, 2016, noted that the amendment was passed by the House, but stripped from the bill before its final passage. Thus, the attackers who can be seen in the video of this incident, (short version), are part of an entity authorized to receive U.S. funding through official channels of aid to Ukraine.

The website www.dialog.ua reports that Azov Civil Corps leader Nazar Kravchenko called the attack justified, because the Left Opposition flags allegedly include “Soviet symbols,” which are now illegal in Ukraine, and was a “communist action,” such has also been outlawed. Kravchenko also lied that Vitrenko had fled the scene, whereas in fact she resumed her speech on economic policy, after the attackers had been driven off.

Speaking later during the rally, former MP Vladimir Marchenko demanded that U.S. and European leaders be confronted with what the forces they have backed are doing.

On Feb. 4, the left opposition issued a “Petition to the United Nations and Council of Europe Commissioners for Human Rights concerning the obstruction of the activities of opposition political parties and public organizations by the Ukrainian government, and need to start large-scale international verification of whether human rights and freedoms are being honored in Ukraine.” Its full text is available in English .